The evolving landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions is transforming industries across the world, and e-commerce is one of them. From personalized shopping practices to predictive analytics, it’s completely changing the way brands buy and sell their goods online. 

E-commerce AI is offering 24/7 support through chatbots, optimizing the customer journey and streamlining business operations. 

Let’s not wait any further because in this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about how AI is evolving the e-commerce industry and creating more personalized websites than ever before. 

Personalization

If there’s one thing that has allowed the e-commerce industry to evolve, it’s that AI website builders are taking personalization to a whole new level. AI website builders are growing at an annual compound rate of 27%. 

Most customers nowadays want personalization and research confirms it showing that 71% of customers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. The issue here is that not all retailers successfully implement personalization across different channels and this is problematic since it can hurt your revenue in the long-term. 

AI tools offer personalized product recommendations and improve the shopping experience since they help customers find out what they want instantly, and suggest products that they can benefit from. 

From a retailer’s perspective, this helps in increasing customer loyalty and allows e-commerce businesses to also implement cross-selling and upselling techniques.

Cross-selling involves selling an additional product or service to your existing customer. Upselling, on the other hand, is trying to encourage customers to buy a higher end product than the one in question. 

Smart search

Other than personalized product recommendations, AI allows retailers to entirely understand what a customer’s intentions are in a search query. The average bounce rate of e-commerce shops is around 43%. Smart searches can reduce this number by offering relevant results and recommending the right products. 

Similar to personalized product recommendations, AI identifies patterns in online and offline data to understand what the customer's intentions are. Machine learning (ML) algorithms take this analysis further by making the data contextual. 

AI technology is still evolving and continuously studying user behavior, learning more about individuals' preferences, and making more accurate recommendations when they are shopping. 

Smart search is also excellent for resolving issues that are associated with abandoned carts. The average abandoned cart rate is roughly 70%. Through smart searches, customers' shopping intents are better understood and retailers can show the right product when needed so customers don’t have to think twice about making a purchase or not. 

Virtual assistants/chatbots

Virtual assistants, or AI chatbots are available 24/7 and can handle almost all customer inquiries on their own. They are evolving at such a fast pace that one day, chatbots will even be able to handle advanced customer inquiries without any minor interventions from humans. 

Generative AI is now more advanced in powering conversational commerce online, reducing the time e-commerce employees focus on completing repetitive tasks. Virtual assistants can share product recommendations and provide customers with real-time updates for tracking their packages when an order is placed.

Additionally, many virtual assistants are eliminating language barriers in the supply chain to avoid common mistakes and optimize product descriptions based on keyword analysis and automatic A/B testing. This is super helpful for global audiences. 

Chatbots have an advanced learning algorithm that can cater to individual preferences and provide recommendations based on customer preferences. 

Also, let’s not forget that chatbots are also a cost-effective option for online businesses since they provide automated responses, and you won’t need to be paying anyone to handle these queries or waste any time trying to handle them on your own. 

AI-powered voice searches

The rise of voice-activated devices like smart speakers is paving the way for voice-based shopping. AI-powered voice assistants understand natural language queries and can find the products they need based on the voice commands they give out. 

This shopping method is gaining lots of popularity and ecommerce platforms are optimizing their websites and product listings for voice search to follow this growing trend. Some good examples of AI-powered voice searches include: Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa.

AI-powered voice search helps in faster product discovery, increasing conversion rates, and personalizing suggestions. It can easily be implemented in your online shop in the following ways: 

1. Choose the right voice search tool: Choose a voice search tool that will fit with the website best. This can be either Algolia’s voice search tool, Amazon Alex skills kit, or Google Cloud’s dialog flow. 
2. Conduct A/B testing: Test different keywords and phrases that will work best for your target audience. 
3. Always update your AI models: Use customer interactions to improve and refine your voice search accuracy. 
4. Follow the right integration steps: Including determining the platform you are going to use and if it supports voice search. After, you need to add the proper plugins for allowing voice search functionality and as an end, you should customize the search experience to match your products catalog. 

Voice search technology hasn’t reached an end, and is still evolving over time. With new advancements in AI and NLP and new voice commerce trends, it will be exciting to see what’s next. 

AI web builders and web design optimization 

AI web builders have a significant impact on web design and provide customers with many advantages:

1. Cost-effective: AI web tools are a cost-effective option and only require you to make a monthly subscription payment instead of hiring a web developer and designer. 
2. Reduced time-consumption: It takes an AI web tool a few minutes to hours to create a website. These tools automate the design process, generate content, are available 24/7, and have a drag-and-drop tool that you can use for adjusting images, text, and other important web elements without any coding knowledge.
3. User-friendly: Different from traditional web developers, AI web building tools are available at all times. AI tools guide you throughout the entire web creation process, giving the upper hand to beginners without any coding knowledge. Also, these tools have real-time previews that allow you to see the adjustments made to the content without needing to refresh or reload the content. 

Web design is changing forever with the help of AI, and this is also impacting how websites integrate with e-commerce features. 

AI image recognition 

AI image recognition is used for analyzing and interpreting images, enabling automated product tagging, better product recommendations, and improved search functionality. AI image recognition uses the help of both machine learning algorithms and data sets. 

It’s important for e-commerce because it helps in product tagging, visual search, inventory management, and using augmented reality (AR) technology, which gives customers a virtual product tour.

It’s always important to optimize your online store for AI image recognition. Using high-resolution images with a clear background is better, making sure product images are consistent in style and size, and regularly updating AI with new product data and images to keep it accurate. 

The future of AI image recognition is bright in the e-commerce world. Moreover, the AI image recognition market is expected to grow by 9% until 2030. 

Advancements in computer vision will allow AI image recognition to offer a much more personalized shopping experience, AI-assisted visual content creation and better AI-generated product images. 

Predictive analytics for supporting inventory management 

AI algorithms can easily analyze historical sales data, market trends, and social media for predicting future demand for some products. This allows ecommerce businesses to effectively manage inventory levels, prevent stock-outs, and reduce storage costs. 

Also, they can analyze new product trends and preferences, helping you effectively create your product development and marketing strategy. Without monitoring performance, you can’t ever succeed in creating an ideal strategy for your online business. 

AI is revolutionizing the web-building landscape faster than ever before 

AI is changing the e-commerce landscape completely and helping in building and maintaining a successful online business. The future for AI technology in website building is bright and not only is it adapting to the growing demand for smart assistants and voice commerce, it’s also starting to integrate with other uprising tools like augmented reality (AR). 

While AI web builders still run into some challenges, it doesn’t mean that it won’t get past them in the future. AI technology is continuously evolving and is becoming better at managing customer data privacy, improving data accuracy, and making sure that the content it generates aligns with the brand’s voice and values.